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WHY IS IT THE CIA BUT NOT *THE NASA? ACRONYMS, INITIALISMS, AND DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS

WHY IS IT THE CIA BUT NOT *THE NASA? ACRONYMS, INITIALISMS, AND DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS Using 61 acronyms and initialisms culled from Web sites in May 2003, this study shows that the syntactic behavior of abbreviations from phrases is regular. When a definite description is abbreviated, its syntactic category is predictable, depending on whether the result is an acronym ( ERIC, NAFTA ) or an initialism ( FBI, NSF ). Acronyms behave like proper names and drop the definite determiner: "ERIC produces a variety of publications...." Initialisms continue to behave like common compound nouns and retain the determiner: "... the FBI has unique response capabilities...." Two frequent exceptions, university names ( UCLA ) and television networks ( NBC ), are shown to act like bare locative nominals in English ( go to school ). Other apparent exceptions ( GE, AA ) are also shown to exhibit regularity. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage Duke University Press

WHY IS IT THE CIA BUT NOT *THE NASA? ACRONYMS, INITIALISMS, AND DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS

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References (9)

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Duke University Press
ISSN
0003-1283
eISSN
1527-2133
DOI
10.1215/00031283-79-4-368
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Using 61 acronyms and initialisms culled from Web sites in May 2003, this study shows that the syntactic behavior of abbreviations from phrases is regular. When a definite description is abbreviated, its syntactic category is predictable, depending on whether the result is an acronym ( ERIC, NAFTA ) or an initialism ( FBI, NSF ). Acronyms behave like proper names and drop the definite determiner: "ERIC produces a variety of publications...." Initialisms continue to behave like common compound nouns and retain the determiner: "... the FBI has unique response capabilities...." Two frequent exceptions, university names ( UCLA ) and television networks ( NBC ), are shown to act like bare locative nominals in English ( go to school ). Other apparent exceptions ( GE, AA ) are also shown to exhibit regularity.

Journal

American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage – Duke University Press

Published: Dec 1, 2004

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